It was early Wednesday morning. The sun just coming up, coffee in hand, Jojo nearby, working through some quiet thoughts before the day picked up speed.
I looked up from what I was doing.
The clouds were extraordinary. And beyond them — the foothills. Visible for the first time in what felt like weeks. After a long summer of smoke and haze and the mountains just gone from the skyline, there they were again.
I felt like I could place myself again.
That's the only way I can describe it. Not relief exactly. Not joy. Something more like orientation. Like a part of my nervous system that had been quietly working without reference points finally got to rest.
I'd read something recently about looking to the horizon — that shifting your gaze to something far away signals safety to the nervous system. That up-close focus, the kind that comes from screens and phones and faces and the ten inches between you and whatever you're managing, keeps something activated. Something alert. But distance — real distance, the kind where your eyes have to travel — tells your body: we are not in immediate danger. We can breathe.
I think about this every time I pick my head up from my phone and look out from the balcony across the tops of the trees.
I love being at tree level. I love looking out through branches. I love the particular feeling of height without distance — of being above the ground but still inside the living world. And I wonder sometimes, even now, nearly turning 51, if that's why I've always wanted to live in a treehouse.
Not as a fantasy. As a real preference for how I want to exist in space.
Up. Out. Looking toward something far away.
There's something about the mountains specifically.
They don't move. They don't need anything. They've been there through everything — the smoke, the summer, the ordinary accumulation of hard days — and they're still there when the air finally clears. Looking at them doesn't require anything of me. I don't have to respond or manage or adjust. I just have to look.
That's rare.
Most of what I look at all day requires something back. A screen wants a response. A face wants attention. A task wants completion. Even the plants, much as I love them, are looking to me for something.
The mountains aren't.
And maybe that's what safety feels like in the body — not the absence of danger exactly, but the presence of something that doesn't need you to do anything. Something you can rest your eyes on and just be the one looking.
I've known this since I was little. Driving toward Bogus Basin, the ski resort, I always knew I was heading north. Maybe a little northeast or northwest, but north. The mountains told me. They still do. I don't need a map when I can see the foothills — I know exactly where I am.
That's what I mean by placing myself.
I'm going to keep picking my head up.
Not as a practice with a name. Not as a tool I implement. Just as the thing I do when I remember that the foothills are still out there, past the tops of the trees, holding still while everything else moves.
Truth line: I felt like I could place myself again.
If you're new here: this is what I mean by returning to self—ordinary moments, honest noticing, and small choices that don't require self-abandonment. Start here: Why 55 Houseplants.
